![]() Schlink tells his story with marvelous directness and simplicity." - The New York Times "Haunting. leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart." - The New York Times Book Review "Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this and other texts."A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." - Los Angeles Times "Moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful. Of course what we see is that the relationship is not nearly that simple: her illiteracy does not stop her from morally engaging with the world around her, or from feeling empathy, most notably in her role as listener. ![]() If there was a stronger and more consistent causal relationship between her illiteracy and involvement in the concentration camps, the text would almost necessarily be apologist: she would have been excusable because ignorant of basic moral laws due to a thwarted education. I think your restating of my position that the illiteracy issue is "merely" a red herring accurately reveals a problem with Schlink's text that I didn't fairly address or grapple with: Hanna's illiteracy DOES have the feeling of occasionally standing in for a "moral illiteracy." Schlink is using her inability to read as a trope, a painfully facile metaphor that is distracting in its inconsistency. Despite this fault, it is a novel well worth reading. ![]() The title, Hanna's illiteracy, and the form that Michael gives to Hanna's will are red herrings, distracting from the main point with their seeming profundity, rendered shallow by context. The real shortcoming of this novel lies in the steps that Schlink takes to cover up his intent in pushing this political envelope. No human experience ought to be censored, so we should applaud the bravery of Schlink for putting himself in the avant garde. It explores a topic hitherto rendered taboo by the fate of the victims of the prior generation, whose sufferings were more extensive, more physical, and more permanent than that of their assailants' children. This book is, finally, about the "German fate" of the latter twentieth century. Michael's isolation allows him the distance to see what exactly that fate entails upon his country's citizens. Although he finally recognizes that his trials are those of a whole generation, he can't find comfort in that in the moment because his love for Hanna made "the fate of generation, a German fate.more difficult for to evade, more difficult for to manage than for others" (171). His life cannot be so easily repaired because he must acknowledge that he loved, and loves, a woman who embodies all the inhumanity of the Third Reich. He faces and risks more than most of his peers, who can submerge the stark generational rift under the guise of the normal individuation of early adulthood. Understanding that Michael has control over the narrative allows one to see that it is really the story of a young man failing to progress through the normal stages of maturation not because of any personal defect but because of a defect of the era in his country: he is of the generation that must reject its parents as either active or passive participants in the holocaust. At no point do we have access to Hanna's interiority, and at times we are left to doubt that she really has one. It is Michael who frames Hanna for us, first as an exotic older woman to whom he gives his heart, then as a woman ignorant that right extends beyond following orders, and finally as a convict, resentful of society's sentence upon her but still haunted by the specters of her victims. Rather, she is an object that moves in and out of the the narrator's life, and allows him to put a face on the atrocities of the war and to prevent them from becoming numbing cliches. ![]() Hanna, however, is never the agent who defines meaning in the novel. By giving the book this title, Schlink suggests that the important perspective is Hanna's. The narrator, young Michael Berg, is the eponymous"reader," but only in the eyes of Hanna. I think it important to note that the novel has a misleading title. ![]() It may arise from the tension produced in the reader by a novel that asks us to confront a story we've not yet been asked to confront: how do non-Jewish Germans recover from the stain upon their country and their forbears, who, whether tacitly or not, consented to the persecution of millions of humans? People have therefore been concerned that Bernard Schlink seeks some kind of sympathy or absolution for the more ignorant perpetrators of the holocaust. The trial of Hanna forms the central point of the novel, and her lover tells its story. The Reader is a novel that has generated some controversy because of the way it characterizes Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate German who worked as a prison guard at Auschwitz. ![]()
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